By Dr Benjamin Chemouni 13 May 2016 Benjamin is the country researcher for Rwanda in ESID’s project on comparative public sector reform in Ghana, Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda. This project is centred on the political economy of reform in the sectors of public sector planning, civil servi

By Pablo Yanguas 5 April 2016 Will legal reform be enough? How can regular people be involved in debates about effectiveness? Is there an African philosophy of the public sector that can succeed where Western models have failed? Can civil society act as a catalyst for change when poli

14 March 2016 [Blog post excerpted from Yanguas & Bukenya (2016), ‘New’ approaches confront ‘old’ challengers in African public sector reform, Third World Quarterly 37 (1)] Public Sector Reform (PSR) is one of the central unsolved challenges of the developm

11 January 2016 By Pablo Yanguas. After a bit of a delay, my article with Badru Bukenya on new approaches to PSR has finally hit Third World Quarterly‘s website (print publication will take a while longer). Here is the abstract: The disappointing performance of conventional publ

7 December 2015 What is your background and how did you become involved in ESID? I did a degree in Political Science at the University of Ghana followed by a Masters in Public Administration in Norway. I did my PHD at York University , UK, with Adrian Leftwich and it was there that I

30 October 2015 By Pablo Yanguas. Serendipity is an often-neglected feature of academic life. Having moved to Manchester in order to join ESID in 2013, I could not have predicted that one of the very authors who had influenced my graduate musings on state building and civil-military r

12 October 2015 By Pablo Yanguas. On 3 November, ESID will co-host the first Samuel Finer “Development of Government” conference at the University of Manchester. This one-day event, running from 9am to 8:30pm, serves two purposes. First, we want to celebrate the work of t

4 August 2015 Professor David Hulme, ESID’s CEO, introduces this new edition of Governance, Management and Development: Making the State Work. He outlines how the debates have changed and sums up the four key themes of the book. The last 25 years have seen the most rapid economi

8 April 2015 By Pablo Yanguas. On April 2nd ODI hosted a group of aid practitioners and public sector researchers gathered for the purpose of discussing whether the “Doing Development Differently” (DDD) agenda can in fact be managed by development organisations. It seemed